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ACA Jokes Just Keep Coming

If laughter is the best medicine, then the whole goal of Obamacare must have been to kid us all the way to good health. Because the reality of the poorly conceived plan is absolutely hilarious!

In March 2010, Obamacare was about to be voted upon by the House of Representatives, and the Democrats were in the process of deciding whether to ignore public opinion at their peril.  At that time, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that Obamacare would cost $938 billion over a decade and would reduce the number of uninsured people by 19 million as of 2014 (with a reduction of 1 million prior to 2014 and 18 million in 2014 alone).  Unimpressed, the American people overwhelmingly opposed the intrusive overhaul — with 20 of 21 polls taken that month showing it to be unpopular, most of them by double digits. The Democrats willfully passed Obamacare anyway and lost 63 House seats that November.

Two years later, the Supreme Court declared Obamacare’s coercive Medicaid expansion to be unconstitutional as written, and the CBO adjusted its projection for the number of uninsured accordingly.  Itprojected that Obamacare would reduce the number of uninsured by 14 million as of 2014 (2 million before 2014 and 12 million in 2014 alone), at a 10-year cost of $1.677 trillion — or $739 billion more than the 2010 projection.  (This February, the CBO projected that Obamacare’s 10-year cost would eclipse $2 trillion.)

Bwahahahahahahahhahah—doh!

I think I pulled a muscle…

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More Obamacare Fun

Firstly, our friend, Steve Green, is pointing out some of what I was mentioning below and then goes a few thoughts deeper on the subject in The Week the Wheels Came Off Obamacare.

The pols and pundits can argue and fingerpoint until they’re blue in the — finger? — but Obamacare’s numbers paint a bleak picture of broken promises and outright lies. After a full month, nearly 40,000 people have successfully signed up for health insurance at HealthCare.gov, out of an administration goal of over seven million by the end of March. At that rate, the administration will have met its goal sometime in the autumn — of 2028.

Mind you, the goal of Obamacare was to provide coverage for some 47,000,000 uninsured Americans. So take those 15 years and multiply them by about seven. You’re gonna need a bigger calculator.

Ignored in those dreary statistics is the fact that people are being dumped out of their current coverage and onto the nonfunctional exchanges faster than the exchanges can handle them. An estimated 1,500,000 have lost their coverage, up against those newly insured 40,000. The best guess is that seven or eight million more face the same fate.

And that’s just the first few paragraphs.

This little article dives into the numbers in Kentucky— and it’s dismal.

These notes serve to reinforce my belief that when the numbers start turning positive, the “newly covered” are going to be nothing of the sort. Folks stripped of coverage by government mandate will be the first, largest influx of Obamacare enrollees.

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Predicting the Lie of Obamacare Succes

Sometime, when the “glitches” with the Affordable Care Act websites are fixed and the system is chugging along dysfunctionally, someone is going to start sharing the number of folks who have signed up for “cheap, affordable” healthcare. Those numbers will tell us that thousands upon thousands of people are signing up and we will be lead to believe that those people were the kinds of folks who used to be shut out of the system because they couldn’t afford care or because they had pre-existing conditions. There will be some truth to those assertions.

And there will be a huge lie, too.

See, with literally hundreds of thousands of people losing their insurance coverage because of the ACA, a huge number of the first wave of folks signing up will very likely be those who had, until recently, been covered. That is, they had already been in the system, they had already had coverage, and they had already entered into a voluntary contractual relationship with insurance companies, paid their money, and had their needs met. Perversely, that voluntary relationship was destroyed by the ACA, which then compels an involuntary relationship with another insurance company. Even better, with the new rules, some of those folks will likely be getting government subsidies on their insurance costs.

Read this from a Kaiser Health News story:

Health plans are sending hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters to people who buy their own coverage, frustrating some consumers who want to keep what they have and forcing others to buy more costly policies.

The main reason insurers offer is that the policies fall short of what the Affordable Care Act requires starting Jan. 1. Most are ending policies sold after the law passed in March 2010.  At least a few are cancelling plans sold to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

Now, let’s say it again: the government will be paying people to break their voluntary contractual relationships in order to compel them into doing what they were already doing.  And those folks will then be held up as examples of how well the system is working. And we will be told that this is more efficient and effective.

[button link=”http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2013/October/21/cancellation-notices-health-insurance.aspx” type=”small” color=”black” newwindow=”yes”] Read the original.[/button]